The Shroud of Turin continues to spark intense theological debate. While one side believes that the cloth is nothing more than a medieval forgery, the other contends that the x-ray-like image imprinted on it was supernaturally created during Jesus Christs resurrection.

In the past, claims that it was the work of a renaissance artist, an optical illusion or, as mentioned, a legitimate, faith-inspired phenomenon have abounded. Without a doubt, the cloth has confounded supporters and detractors, alike, for decades.

Now, The Mystery of the Shroud, a book that examines new chemical and mechanical tests that were more recently conducted on the shroud, seems to side with the latter assessment. Journalist Saverio Gaeta and Giulio Fanti of Italys University of Padua (professor of mechanical and thermal measurement) collaborated on the new book that maintains that the Shroud of Turin dates back to the 1st century and not to a later time period as some have contended.

As TheBlaze previously reported, the shroud features an image of a bearded man (i.e. Jesus) whose body appears to have wounds from nails in his hands and feet  the same locations that some believe were affected when Christ was nailed to the cross....

Even if the shroud was the burial cloth of Christ, even if certified dead people came back to life speaking of the horrors of hell; if stubborn sin ridden folk don’t want to submit to God then they’ll come up with any excuse not to do so!

If they don’t accept the testimony of even Thomas, will they even accept the shroud without doubt?

Reminds me of Lazarus and the rich man, ...

Luk 16:27-31
(27) Then he said, I pray thee therefore, father, that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house:
(28) For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment.
(29) Abraham saith unto him, They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.
(30) And he said, Nay, father Abraham: but if one went unto them from the dead, they will repent.
(31) And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.

On the other hand, even in the Shroud, the Gospel is made manifest and may be used as a reference in communicating the Word of God.

11
posted on 03/30/2013 3:44:21 AM PDT
by Cvengr
(Adversity in life and death is inevitable. Thru faith in Christ, stress is optional.)

I am certainly no expert on the Shroud, but I have read about it extensively and seen several documentaries.

When the previous tests were completed on the Shroud (back in 1988 or so) I was stunned to watch the evening news and have them declare that the dating tests placed the Shroud as being from the 14th or 15th Century.

I remember asking the person next to me: "Didn't the same reporter just say the cloth was repaired using period cloth because of a fire during thin 1532?"

The person next to me said: "Yeah, that's what he said."

And both of us looked at each other, and then the TV screen where they declared the entire Shroud as a Medieval forgery.

Call me crazy, but not only was that all bad science, it was duplicitous and blatantly dishonest - by all parties involved: the scientific community, the Vatican, and the news media.

It almost seemed as if evil forces were at work.

In the past few years, using the latest computer and forensic technology, the Shroud has yielded even more evidence regarding a three dimensional image that NO OTHER piece of cloth from history has.

There are powers at work here beyond science. I believe God has left us the Shroud as a road marker of ultimate faith - either you take read the road marker and heed it, or you don't and drive off the cliff.

People should realize where that cliff ultimately leads if they do not have Christ in their lives.

It is the ultimate doom.

"Then Jesus told him, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

There are also pollens in the fabric from plants which grow only in Israel near Jerusalem.

I knew about the pollen but this is the first time I have heard anything about wax drops .. from the actual funeral. Speaking of pollen, they can trace the route of the shroud from Italy all the way back to Jerusalem from the pollen found on the shroud.

Samples of pollen collected from the Shroud by commission member Frei (1978) yielded identifications of 49 species of plants, representative of specific phytogeographical regions. In addition to 16 species of plants found in northern Europe, Frei identified 13 species of halophyte and desert plants "very characteristic of or exclusive to the Negev and Dead Sea area." A further 20 plant types were assigned to the Anatolian steppes, particularly the region of southwestern Turkey-northern Syria, and the Istanbul area. Frei concluded that the Shroud must have been exposed to air in the past in Palestine, Turkey, and Europe.

What I find ludicrous about the notion of a medieval artist having painted the shroud is that during the medieval era, artists did not fully understand perspective, which is why figures look “flat” and two dimensional on the canvas. Yet on the shroud you can see depth in the figure. I could never understand how the medieval artist hoax theory ever got traction for that reason,

A Jesuit priest by the name of Francis Filas used to make tours and films about the shroud. He had a brother Thomas, who was among other things was a composer of religious music that I happen to know and would sing his hymns at this small rural parish church to which we both belonged. Both brothers devoted their lives to promoting the shroud and when Tom passed away the bult of his estate went into supporting scientific examination of this sacred object.
It seems their faith in this object has been supported.

You know what always got me: The location of the nails. Here’s an exercise for anyone who thinks it’s from the middle ages. Go to the Uffizi in Florence, or the Academia (where Michaelangelo’s David is) or even the Louve, and check out the artwork from the 12th to the 15th centuries, 100 years before and after the shroud was “made” according to the C14 results. Every third or fourth painting will be about the crucifixion, and every one shows the nails going through Christ’s palms.

All of them are wrong. The Romans didn’t crucify like that. It can’t support the body. Instead the Romans drove the nails through a point in the wrist below the thumb. Research has demonstrated this.

Now look at the shroud.

Would someone who doesn’t believe in the shroud care to explain to me why an artist depicted an accurate Roman crucifixion at a time when everyone else around him, including his patron, would have expected the nails through His palms as normal and accurate?

The image is a negative, which becomes positive when viewing a photographic negative. Why on earth would a would be forger create a negative image ? It does seem slightly taller than the average height of Jesus’ time and there is only one piece of cloth when the Bible clearly states two but it basically seems real to me as well.

The Bible describes two pieces of cloth, but they are not both “burial shrouds” as you see this. Conventional burial practices at the time would indicate that the second piece of cloth was a much smaller one that was wrapped only around the head of the deceased.

As TheBlaze previously reported, the shroud features an image of a bearded man (i.e. Jesus) whose body appears to have wounds from nails in his hands and feet  the same locations that some believe were affected when Christ was nailed to the cross....

It’s a historic artifact. It has been examined by the same forensic methods used on other historic artifacts,including historic artifacts in criminal trials.

Except that it has been examined more thoroughly than any other historic artifact in history.

And the science evidence by a vast, overwhelming preponderance points to this being a burial shroud from the time of Jesus with an image formed in an inexplicable manner.

It does NOT prove the Resurrection. It does, however, point pretty strongly to the historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

It is mentioned in the Bible—the curious scene where John and Peter run to the tomb and see the graveclothes. I never understood why the autbor bothered to mention that the graveclothes were lying there.

But it’s clear to me now that they had picked up those graveclothes and preserved them as relics. The author of JOhn’s gospel thought everyone knew about those relics, everyone knew they had been preserved, so he didn’t say anymore about them.

The Shroud does not prove the Resurrection but it makes it more believable. What the Shroud really does is show that it’s possible to preserve a relic of this sort over thousands of years, despite war and pillaging and the changes in governments and cultures.

If people consider an artifact really, really, really, really important they can defy impossible odds to preserve it.

And the Shroud is a testimony to the continuity of the Church over all these centuries. Perhaps the Church’s preservation of the story of Jesus is not garbled and mythologized but
actually
really
really
true?

Jesus resurrection is a matter of faith. Either you believe the Lord rose or you do not. I do not need a bunch of liberals, who were not there, who have their anti-Christian, anti-Jesus, pro-homo agenda, telling me. The Bible is good enough for me. It was good enough for my great-great grandparents, my great grandparents, my grandparents, my parents. Thus, it is good enough for me. Their faith, even way back then, led down through the years, before these homo lovers came to the front, taught us the Bible is the TRUTH. I don’t doubt it. Those that do, do so at their peril. I will not argue with anyone about it. If you don’t believe, then you had better be correct. If you are wrong, you will regret for all eternity your decision. I believe, thus I am not worried about it. My eternity is secure in the Lord Jesus Christ, Yeshua.

If the point of the exercise is to either prove or disprove the Bible, you cannot use the Bible itself as part of the proof. When you do that, it's called a tautology: a self reinforcing statement that cannot be disproved.

If you are going to prove that the Bible story about Christ being crucified at a certain place and on a certain time is true, you can't just say its true because the Bible says so and still claim it's a scientific argument, or a logical argument. It's not an argument at all when posed that way, it's a statement of faith.

32
posted on 03/30/2013 8:08:33 AM PDT
by slowhandluke
(It's hard to be cynical enough in this age.)

It does seem slightly taller than the average height of Jesus time and there is only one piece of cloth when the Bible clearly states two but it basically seems real to me as well.

There exists, in Spain, a second cloth, a facecloth, which is linked to the Shroud. Its provenance is less disputed than the shroud, having been traced historically from the Middle East to Spain well within the time frame.

While this particular item does not have the image phenomenon the shroud does, it does have some interesting supportive characteristics. It bears blood stains in the fabric just as the shroud does. Those blood stains were examined by forensic types, and it was determined that it is possible, indeed likely, that because of the positioning, and shape of those stains, that this 'face cloth' lay on top of the shroud itself.

To those who claim that the shroud is nothing more than a middle ages forgery, how can *this* be explained?

"n the past few years, using the latest computer and forensic technology, the Shroud has yielded even more evidence regarding a three dimensional image that NO OTHER piece of cloth from history has."

Actually, my friend, that was established back in 1977, even prior to the original STURP team investigation in 1978, using the VP8 Image Analyzer (now very old technology; state of the art at the time).

...or.....how about this: the fact that the Shroud image is a photographic negative, and that the blood trails follow the laws of circulation.....both 500 years before either was discovered by man? ...or the fact that the Shroud image is anatomically perfect, and there is no piece of art on the planet that is anatomically perfect......or the fact that you cannot even see the image until you are at least 11 feet away, so an “artist” would have had to use a VERY long paint brush....

Historian Josephus and later Tacitus mention Jesus either directly or tangentially in their writings. There is also the Pilate Stone and other things of the time that lend credence to the existence of Jesus.

The shroud has a demonstrated power to be an instrument of conversion, and I don’t see anything wrong with it being used to strengthen and confirm faith in a tangible, physical way, that can also help bring others who require proof to a knowledge of Gods saving grace. Many scientists studying the Shroud have come to believe in Jesus Christ. if the evidence merit the historians trust, then we can more easily extend that trust to the rest of the Gospel accounts of Christs life.

Clearly I was looking for scientific proof. DNA is the best indicator of that. Facial similarity is far from scientific, not to mention that we have no photos of Jesus that I am aware of.

The physical representations of Jesus that we are always presented with have to be inaccurate, anyway. Jesus had to have Semitic features being from that region, yet his likeness is not portrayed that way today, so what exactly are we comparing to the image in the shroud?

This has nothing to do with the validity of Jesus in Christianity. I just think that there is zero scientific evidence that ties Jesus to the shroud, and frankly I don’t understand why anyone cares about whether the shroud is related to Jesus.

Yeah, and that one has also been preserved,at Oviedo in Spain. Its facial image lines up perfectly with the one on the Shroud.

THe Shroud IS one of the two graveclothes mentioned in John.

I have to disagree in part to correct a misstatement. There is no facial image on the Sudarium of Oviedo, only blood stains. These stains, and a bloody hand print, however, do bear seventy-two points of congruity with blood stains on the Shroud of Turin. 21 points of congruity is considered a perfect match in fingerprinting. I know. These are not fingerprints.

It is my contention that after the Sudarium was used to cover Jesus head on the cross and while carrying him to the tomb, it was further used by rolling it diagonally into a rope like form and then used to tie "around" his head, passing under his jaw and beard, behind his forelocks and ears, and then tied at the top of his head to keep his mouth closed in death to prevent gaping as part of the bindingsthe other bindings being those needed to keep his arms and legs from flopping after rigor passedthus meeting the statement about the cloth that was "wrapped around his head" that was left apart from the other graves clothes. It was this rolled and tied Sudarium that Jesus pulled from around his head as he walked from the tomb and dropped on his way out. . . a very natural act, freeing himself from the binding around his head.

I have tested this hypothesis with a cloth cut to the exact rectangular dimensions of the Sudarium preserved at Oviedo. When rolled diagonally along the hypotenuse of the 84cm x 53cm Sudarium the resultin "binding" is almost exactly one meter at 99.3cm, which is more than enough to wrap under the chin around behind the ears and then be tied at the crown. The Sudarium has repeated blood stains showing that it was rolled in just such a manner while some of the blood was still fresh enough to transfer across the roll.

46
posted on 03/31/2013 11:42:50 PM PDT
by Swordmaker
(This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users continue...)

...or.....how about this: the fact that the Shroud image is a photographic negative, and that the blood trails follow the laws of circulation.....both 500 years before either was discovered by man? ...or the fact that the Shroud image is anatomically perfect, and there is no piece of art on the planet that is anatomically perfect......or the fact that you cannot even see the image until you are at least 11 feet away, so an artist would have had to use a VERY long paint brush....

I agree with your basic premise, however, it is even stranger than that. It is NOT a photographic negative, because it has been scientifically determined that there are no light generated or affected artifacting in the image! What they have determined is that the image is an analogue database; a terrain map in direct intensity, contrast if you will, of body to cloth distance with a strange twist of some radiological data included for certain body parts (teeth, phalanges of wrist and hand).

By no "light generated or artifacting", they mean there is no evidence of illumination, shadowing, reflection, or refraction anywhere on the Shroud. Instead they discovered a direct correlation of body to cloth distance and image color intensity. Whatever the causal modality, the closer the cloth to the body, the greater the intensity of the image, with the highest intensity occurring with contact and lowest fading to zero evenly at approximately 12cm.

47
posted on 04/01/2013 12:01:54 AM PDT
by Swordmaker
(This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users continue...)

The physical representations of Jesus that we are always presented with have to be inaccurate, anyway. Jesus had to have Semitic features being from that region, yet his likeness is not portrayed that way today, so what exactly are we comparing to the image in the shroud?

Actually, no, he does not have to be "Semitic" as a large portion of the population were in that period what are today referred to as high noble Arabs. Tall, athletic, muscular. Think Omar Sharif. Much like what we see in the man in the Shroud who is variously calculated to be 5' 10" to 5' 10 1/2" tall, hardly out of the normal range. They accounted for approximately 40% of the Jewish population of Israel in the 1st Century.

A census of 1st Century male skeletons in Jerusalem cemeteries found the average male stature was 5' 8 1/8" tall. The average height of men in America today is 5' 8 3/8", a quarter inch taller. Strangely, the average height of the Roman conquerors in the 1st century was only 5' 6".

Remember, we are talking about the single most investigated and studied historical object in history! You really don't think a claim that it can't be real because it doesn't look Semitic would NOT have been investigated by now, do you? Prior to Secondo Pia's first photographs of the Shroud in 1898, the only research being done was essentially historical and iconographic.

48
posted on 04/01/2013 12:19:41 AM PDT
by Swordmaker
(This tag line is a Microsoft insult free zone... but if the insults to Mac users continue...)

The other cloth is believed to be the “Sudarium of Oviedo, or Shroud of Oviedo, is a bloodstained cloth...”

Has similar markings as the shroud and same rare blood type (AB). It is also mentioned in a historical document from 570 AD - which is can be used to support that the shroud was around much earlier than the middle ages.

50
posted on 04/01/2013 12:30:26 AM PDT
by 21twelve
("We've got the guns, and we got the numbers" adapted and revised from Jim M.)

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